Supply chain planning applications develop production and distribution plans to attempt to match supply with demand to meet business objectives. Today, supply chains are often extremely complex spaghetti networks, including large networks of supplier facilities, manufacturing facilities, distribution facilities, and sales channels spread around the world. As a result, a supply chain plan may include a large number of problems, such as late orders, short orders, over utilized or underutilized resources, safety stock violations, or other problems. It is typically the responsibility of a planner to minimize such problems by attempting to investigate any potential plan problems and generate a new plan to avoid these potential problems.
Supply chain planning and other advanced planning system applications typically provide a single dimensional “problem window” that presents problems in a given plan, which are typically categorized according to type and prioritized according to severity. In an effort to rectify these isolated problems, planners may directly compare current plans with previous plans to determine the status of plan problems. However, there are several shortcomings associated with such isolated single dimensional applications. As an example, such comparisons may require a great deal of time and effort on the part of a planner, may be plagued by human error, and may provide limited insight into the actual multi-dimensional plan problems. As another example, such applications may not account for the fact that problems may have life cycles such that they repeatedly arise in successive planning cycles or that actions taken to correct such problems may have multi-dimensional effects in successive planning cycles. As yet another example, reconciling the results of a current plan with those of previous plans using such applications may require direct comparisons between stored plans, which are limited in their ability to give insight into the actual plan problems, particularly over long periods of time. As still another example, such applications may provide no way to efficiently identify and prioritize problems across a multi-dimensional supply chain network.
Although great strides have been made in the area of supply chain planning, many shortcomings remain.